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Political Science

Environmental education

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Full-Text Articles in Education

If Animals Could Talk: Reflection On The Dutch Party For Animals In Student Assignments, Helen Kopnina Jan 2019

If Animals Could Talk: Reflection On The Dutch Party For Animals In Student Assignments, Helen Kopnina

Animal Studies Journal

This article explores how concern about animal welfare and animal rights relates to ecological citizenship by discussing student assignments written about the Dutch Party for Animals or PvdD. ‘Animal welfare’, ‘animal rights’, and ‘ecological citizenship’ perspectives offer insights into strategic choices of eco-representatives and animal rights/welfare advocates as well as educators. The assignments balance animal issues with socio-economic ones, explore the relationship between sustainability and ethics, and attribute responsibility for unsustainable or unethical practices. Analysis of student assignments reveals nuanced positions on the anthropocentrism-ecocentrism continuum, showing students’ ability to critically rethink their place within larger environmental systems. Some students demonstrated …

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Protecting The Last Tree: Environmental Education In The United States, 1990-2012, Liza R. Baskir May 2012

Protecting The Last Tree: Environmental Education In The United States, 1990-2012, Liza R. Baskir

Pitzer Senior Theses

Having already been hired as an environmental organizer, I reflect on how my childhood experiences impacted me. I embark upon this vocational journey with youthful optimism, a good dose of realism, and just a touch of cynicism. An environmental organizer is someone who works mobilizing individuals around targeted environmental issues. They create policy changes that are environmentally positive… generally for little pay. What has motivated me, and scores of others, to willingly take on this seemingly impossible task? For me: was it the summer vacations to Yellowstone and The Rocky Mountains with my brothers and parents? Maybe it was being …

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A Classroom Teacher's Reflection On Learning Sustainability, Sandra Wooltorton Dec 2006

A Classroom Teacher's Reflection On Learning Sustainability, Sandra Wooltorton

Sandra Wooltorton

In 2004 I taught a class of 31 eleven and twelve year olds in a south-west Western Australian state primary school which I will call Forestdown. After critique and reflection on my 2004 teaching, in 2005 I taught half a day per week at the same school, this time with ten year olds. I used action research (Reason & Bradbury, 2001) to articulate my challenges and to formulate the approach I used to address them. The research context is a prosperous, business-as-usual culture built uupon a foundation of environmental destruction. Even though the children I taught in 2004 performed creditably …

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Ecological Literacy: An Australian Perspective, Sandra Wooltorton Aug 2006

Ecological Literacy: An Australian Perspective, Sandra Wooltorton

Sandra Wooltorton

As I begin to write this paper it is a still, windless autumn day in the tuart woodland in the south-west of Western
Australia. Rain is falling gently and in the bushes and trees there is a musical ensemble of rufous whistlers,
pee-wits, wrens, robins and wagtails. Occasional old jarrah trees spread their grey pin-striped trunks and
branches to display their brown, well-worn possum tracks, revealing use by the brush-tails in the safety of
night. The comparatively youthful peppermint and huge old tuart trees host the endangered ringtail possums that
come out in the dark, when the quenda scurries about …

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A Participatory Approach To Learning Sustainability Feb 2006

A Participatory Approach To Learning Sustainability

Sandra Wooltorton

I contend that for progress towards a sustainable future, we need an understanding of sustainability as having a core of reconnective learning as an inbuilt ‘driver’. Many writers such as Sterling (2001: 19) call for the elaboration of a new, lived paradigm of sustainable education and learning sustainability. In this chapter, I use notions of primary and secondary meaning and Heron’s (1996) and Reason’s (2004) framework of experiential, presentational, propositional and practical knowledge to propose a transformative, reconnective process for learning sustainability. I articulate a holistic, relational ontology and a participatory epistemology as the basis of the participatory approach. The …

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